Candice McDonald
For the Alamogordo News

Years ago, while I was visiting schools in Germany, our guide would pause whenever we reached a particularly beautiful vista and announce, “Make a picture” — ein foto machen.

The expression stayed with me. A good photograph is not simply snapped into a shutter. It is constructed, shaped by light, framed by judgment, and forged at precisely the right moment.

At its best, a photograph creates awe, recognition, and sometimes even catharsis. At the very least, it persuades observers to stand still for a moment.

George Grant, the first chief photographer for the United States National Park Service, produced photographs that appeared in books, brochures, museum exhibits, newspapers, and even on postage stamps.

His photos were mailed to advertising agencies, travel agents, and railroad promoters and credited to NPS (National Park Service).

Grant’s photographs were marketing tools to entice millions of Americans to visit their new national parks. Americans saw his work but they seldom saw his name.

Grant apparently did not mind. He had a mid-level federal government job bringing a salary of around $3300 a year and he was able to live and explore the most beautiful parts of the southwest.

The origins of an artist

George Alexander Grant was born in 1891 and grew up in Sunbury, Pennsylvania.

Sunbury was a compact, walkable town where daily life was organized around the Susquehanna riverfront, the railroad, and the streets linking homes to work and downtown. The houses were close to each other, a grid of short blocks where everyone walked to shops, churches, offices and to work on the commercial streets and industrial sites. George’s father was the pilot of a steam boat on the river.

George lived with his parents and with his sister, an Irish twin (born within a year of each other) who died suddenly from an intestinal problem.

She had a tummy ache on Saturday night and his family did not attend church the next morning. Little Catherine died around noon, a sweet seven year old who loved to sing.

Grant also had a brother, Robert, who was born two years later.

After completing high school, Grant first worked as an accountant and then moved to the Roycroft Community in East Aurora, New York to become a master craftsman coppersmith.

Roycroft was Elbert Hubbard’s Arts and Crafts community in East Aurora, New York, and Grant apprenticed there. Roycroft was part workshop, part artistic colony, and part experiment in escaping the increasingly industrialized world. Roycrofters produced books, furniture, metalwork, leather goods, pottery and other objects by hand.

Workers were encouraged to learn from one another and develop skills beyond their own trades. Hubbard housed and fed his artisans; he surrounded them with lectures, concerts, festivals and the decidedly radical proposition that work might involve beauty as well as a paycheck.

Hubbard financed Roycroft with the fortune he made as part-owner of Buffalo’s Larkin Soap Company. After selling his interest in the business, he used the proceeds to establish his community.

Roycroft was sustained by subscriptions and sales of magazines, books, and pamphlets, followed by profits from the handicrafts. Hubbard may have abandoned soap, but he never abandoned salesmanship. His business skills kept his utopia booming.

Hubbard believed people should work with “their head, hand and heart,” and employers should provide entertainment to make working pleasurable. Roycroft celebrated useful, beautiful craftsmanship and rejected soulless machine-made goods. Hubbard used modern advertising techniques to sell his concepts and crafts.

In May 1915, Elbert Hubbard set sail for England on the Lusitania. Both he and his wife were killed when the ship was torpedoed and sunk by the German submarine Unterseeboot 20.

Roycroft lost its founder at the bottom of the sea with the Lusitania.

His son Bert kept the business alive for a few more decades but World War I intervened for George Grant and ended his coppersmithing career and communal experience at Roycroft.

Serving his country

Grant was listed as a 6-foot-1, 220 pound, brown haired, brown eyed, WWI draftee with defective eyesight (he wore glasses). He was drafted into the Army and left East Aurora and was sent west to Wyoming.

For a young man coming from the industrial towns of the East, Wyoming must have presented an entirely different scale of geography.

George liked what he saw. When his military service ended at Fort D.A. Russell he was twenty-eight years old, and he did not particularly want to go back East.

He returned to Pennsylvania to live at home and work at a series of construction and factory jobs. George continually wrote letters to the chief ranger at Yellowstone National Park inquiring about ranger positions, but nothing came from the correspondence.

Finally, a new Park Superintendent, Horace Albright, noted that Grant’s resume included his experience in Wyoming during the war and he offered him a seasonal ranger position for the summer of 1922.

It is unclear whether Grant arrived with a camera or found one at the park, but he soon began taking photographs and teaching himself to develop and print them. Albright encouraged his talent and offered him a permanent ranger position.

But winter created too much confinement to keep George employed as a photographer. After losing his horse over a cliff, Grant decided that backcountry rangering required a closer knowledge of survival skills than he possessed. He returned to the East to refine his skills, took photography courses in New York City and then accepted a position as a photographer for Penn State.

He held the position for four years and taught photography at the college. He kept a steady correspondence with Horace Albright seeking an opportunity to return to the National Park Service.

In 1927, the Park Service approved a photographer’s position, and Grant resigned from Penn State and went to California to take it – only to discover that Congress had approved the job but neglected the small detail of paying for it. Outside funding finally rescued the position in 1929.

Grant became the Park Service’s first staff photographer that April, working from its Educational Division at the University of California, Berkeley. During his first season, he traveled thousands of miles and photographed more than a dozen western and southwestern parks. If Americans were going to visit their national parks, they first needed to see them.

The west provided an extravagant landscape: geysers, forests, mountains, deserts, ruins, wildlife, buildings, roads- tourists and rangers were everywhere he pointed his camera, but photographing America was heavy work.

The romantic version of Grant’s career is easy to imagine: a solitary photographer standing before a magnificent Western landscape waiting patiently for the perfect light. Grant’s own recollections were considerably less idyllic.

He worked primarily with 5×7 film, using a large-format camera mounted on a tripod.

His compositions were painstakingly constructed. He used a plumb bob so that ideally nothing would have to be cropped later.

He said, “My buildings don’t lean backwards, and the trees go like railroad tracks…”

A hand camera, Grant explained, couldn’t provide the precision he wanted so he hauled cumbersome photographic equipment across enormous distances..

Grant couldn’t risk making a single exposure. Bellows leaked. Shutters malfunctioned. Cameras went “haywire.” An entire day’s journey could be lost because of a mechanical problem he wouldn’t discover until he developed the film.

He made duplicate shots and later placed the exposures together and marked the one he believed was best.

Nearly every evening on the road, Grant had to find a makeshift dark place where he could remove the day’s exposed film from his holders and reload them for the next morning. It could become exhausting.

Grant admitted that occasionally he was pleased when it rained because bad weather meant he got a respite from making pictures. Even America’s scenery apparently could become tiresome when it was your job.

Grant carefully kept track of the negatives because several photographs of the same subject might look almost identical.

Each exposure had to remain associated with the correct place, subject, time it was taken, and assignment.

When asked about the hardships of traveling through the parks, he said he couldn’t remember how many times he had been in a bind or pulled himself out of a disaster.

“Hell, that happened every day,” he laughed.

Postscript

Before most Americans ever visited White Sands, they saw it through George A. Grant’s camera. After the White Sands had been proclaimed a national monument by President Herbert Hoover on January 18, 1933, the National Park Service had a new landscape to document.

Grant’s camera recorded the dunes as a geological wonder, a landscape reduced almost to its essentials—light, shadow, sky and an apparently endless horizon of white.

Perhaps the greatest demonstration of Grant’s anonymous fame arrived in 1934.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt wanted to issue a series of postage stamps depicting scenes from America’s national parks and monuments. Roosevelt was an enthusiastic stamp collector.

The Post Office Department decided to produce a series of ten National Parks stamps. Five of the 10 designs were chosen from photographs made by George Grant.

Despite the country being in the depths of the Great Depression, the stamps became enormously popul...

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